BARON BURLISON OF ROWLANDS GILThomas Burlison, Baron Burlison, who died on 20 May, 2008, aged 71, started out life as a professional footballer and became a union leader and Labour Party treasurer.He began his career as an apprentice at Lincoln City, then spent five seasons with Hartlepool United as a wing-half between 1957 and 1964, interrupted by two year's national service with the RAF. He played 148 times and scored five goals. After leaving Hartlepool he played for Darlington for a season.After his football career ended the former panel beater went into union activism, becoming a regional officer in the north east office of the General and Municipal Workers' Union (GMB). He became regional secretary in 1978 and was made deputy general secretary in 1991.Around the same time he was given the role of treasurer of the Labour Party and was rewarded with a life peerage in 1997, taking on the barony of Rowlands Gill in Tyne and Wear.Thomas Henry Burlison was born on 23 May, 1936, and raised in Edmondsley, County Durham. He married Valerie Stephenson in 1981 and they had two sons and one daughter.A GMB spokesman paid tribute to Lord Burlison: “Tom Burlison was a long-standing and very loyal GMB official who always had the union's interests at heart.”Alan Donnelly, former leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party, said: “The news of Tom Burlison's death is a terrible shock and is a huge loss for his family. Tom gave me my first job at the age of 21 and played an important role in guiding my early career at the GMB and in politics, as he did for so many other young men and women.“He played a massive role in the life of the North East during its most challenging years in the late 1970s and the 1980s, yet was able to bridge the enormous divisions that resulted from the anti-union politics of the early 1980s.“Membership of the House of Lords was a fitting reward for a man who did much to modernise both the trade union movement and the Labour Party. His stabilising influence through turbulent times ensured that Labour in the North East always remained electable, and helped lay the foundations for Labour's massive success in 1997.”TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: “He was a sturdy, down-to-earth trade unionist, deeply rooted in the North East working-class communities from which he sprang. As well as playing a major industrial role in his union, his canny political skills provided great service to the Labour Party.”
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